Cirrus 120104

It has been a quiet two weeks in my RSS feeds.
Some of the items that did reach me:
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (via LinkedIn and OLDaily). A post by Anu Partanen that includes a link to Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of  Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? (Last year I wrote about what sport can learn from Finnish education.)
An Economist article about The Disposable Academic and the place of PhD research. The article concludes:

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

An alert via PhilPapers about a forthcoming paper in Science and Engineering Ethics written by Ksenija Baždarić, Lidija Bilić-Zulle, Gordana Brumini and Mladen Petrovečki, Prevalence of Plagiarism in Recent Submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal. They analysed all manuscripts submitted in 2009–2010 with plagiarism detection software: eTBLAST , CrossCheck, and WCopyfind . They report that of 754 submitted manuscripts, 105 (14%) were identified by the software as suspicious of plagiarism. A manual verification confirmed that 85 (11%) manuscripts were plagiarized: 63 (8%) were true plagiarism and 22 (3%) were self-plagiarism. They conclude that “the prevalence of plagiarized manuscripts submitted to the CMJ , a journal dedicated to promoting research integrity, was 11% in the 2-year period 2009–2010”.
My Scoop.it feed provided a number of newspaper items from around the globe.

My Paper.li feed has had some excellent items too.
Photo Credit
Here Sleep Deer

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here